Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

The Prince’s liaison with this young woman — long discussed in London where Nellie was known as ‘the Princess of Wales’ — first reached Windsor in a letter from Baron Stockmar, who wondered if the rumours circulating on the Continent would endanger the Prince’s marriage to Princess Alexandra. These rumours were elaborated by that ‘arch gossip of all gossips’, Lord Torrington, who had recently come into waiting. Although Torrington’s stories were notoriously unreliable, ‘a searching enquiry’ had revealed the truth of this one. The Prince Consort was forced to recognize that there could be no doubt of the appalling fact that the Prince of Wales had had sexual experience with a woman who was a known habituée of the most vulgar dance halls in London. Sparing her the ‘disgusting details’, the Prince Consort broke the news to the Queen, then wrote an enormously long and anguished letter to his son in which he elaborated the likely consequences of his terrible sin, the possibility that the woman might have a child by him or get hold of a child and pretend that it was his.

If you were to try and deny it, she can drag you into a Court of Law to force you to own it and there with you (the Prince of Wales) in the witness box, she will be able to give before a greedy Multitude disgusting details of your profligacy for the sake of convincing the Jury; yourself cross-examined by a railing indecent attorney and hooted and yelled at by a Lawless Mob!! Oh, horrible prospect, which this person has in her power, any day to realize! and to break your poor parents’ hearts!

He was too heartbroken to see his son at present, he went on; but he assured him that he would do his best to protect him from the full consequences of his ‘evil deed’. The Prince must, therefore, confess everything, ‘even the most trifling circumstance’, to General Bruce, who would act as the channel of further communication between them.

The Prince did confess everything in the most abjectly apologetic and contrite manner. He declined to name the officers responsible for his degradation; and his father accepted his refusal as right and proper, telling him that it would have been cowardly for him to have done so. But everything else was admitted and regretted: he had yielded to temptation, having tried to resist it. The affair, so far as he was concerned, was now at an end.

The Prince Consort was thankful to recognize that the letter displayed a sincere repentance, and he was prepared to forgive his son for ‘the terrible pain’ which he had caused his parents. But forgiveness could not restore him to the state of innocence and purity which he had lost for ever, and the Prince must hide himself from the sight of God. An early marriage was now essential. Without that he would be lost; and he ‘must not, [he] dare not be lost. The consequences for this country and for the world would be too dreadful!’

Two days after writing this letter of forgiveness and exhortation, the Prince Consort went to Sandhurst to inspect the buildings for the new Staff College and the Royal Military Academy. It was a cold wet day and he returned to Windsor tired out and racked by rheumatic pains. The next day he caught a cold and this, combined with his continuing anxiety over his son, aggravated his insomnia. ‘Albert has such nights since that great worry,’ the Queen wrote anxiously. ‘It makes him weak and tired.’ Ill as he was, however, he felt he must go up to Madingley Hall to talk to his son, to try to make him understand the disgrace he had brought upon himself and his family, and the urgent need to get married. He left on 25 November, feeling ‘greatly out of sorts’, having scarcely closed his eyes at night for the last fortnight. It was another cold, wet day; but he went out for a long walk with his son, who lost the way in his unhappiness and embarrassment so that when they arrived back at the Hall the Prince Consort, though comforted and consoled by their conversation, was utterly exhausted. ‘I am at a very low ebb,’ he told his daughter, the Crown Princess, a few days later. ‘Much worry and great sorrow (about which I beg you not to ask questions) have robbed me of sleep during the past fortnight. In this shattered state I had a very heavy catarrh and for the past four days am suffering from headache and pains in my limbs which may develop into rheumatism.’ In fact, they were developing into a complaint far more serious. By the beginning of the next month the Prince Consort was dying of typhoid fever.

The Queen had no doubt that Bertie was to blame, and she did not want to have him in the Castle. Her ‘dearest Albert’ grew weaker and weaker, shivering and sleepless, listless and resigned to death, his mind wandering from time to time, asking repeatedly for General Bruce. His doctor considered him ‘very ill’ and reported that it was ‘impossible not to be very anxious’. Yet the Queen refused to send for the Prince of Wales, who was taking examinations at Cambridge, and it was without her knowledge that Princess Alice summoned him by telegram. But the telegram was so worded that he still had no idea of the gravity of his father’s condition, particularly as a letter he had just had from Princess Alice had informed him that his father continued to improve. He kept a dinner engagement, caught the last train and arrived at three o’clock on the morning of 14 December, talking cheerfully.

Later that day he went into his father’s room. The dying man smiled at him but did not seem to recognize him and could not speak. Watching over the bed, Princess Alice whispered calmly to General Bruce’s sister, Lady Augusta, ‘This is the death rattle’; and then went out to fetch her mother. The Queen hurried into the room and knelt down beside the bed. The Prince of Wales and the other children knelt down too.

I bent over him and said to him, ‘Es ist Kleines Fräuchen’ (it is your little wife) and he bowed his head; I asked him if he would give me ‘ein Kuss’ (a kiss) and he did so. He seemed half dozing, quite quiet … I left the room for a moment and sat down on the floor in utter despair. Attempts at consolation from others only made me worse … Alice told me to come in … and I took his dear left hand which was already cold, tho’ the breathing was quite gentle and I knelt down by him … Alice was on the other side, Bertie and Lenchen [Helena] … kneeling at the foot of the bed … Two or three long but perfectly gentle breaths were drawn, the hand clasping mine, & (Oh! it turns me sick to write it) all, all, was over … I stood up, kissed his dear heavenly forehead and called out in a bitter and agonizing cry, ‘Oh! My dear Darling!’ and then dropped on my knees in mute, distracted despair, unable to utter a word or shed a tear.

She was led out of the room and lay down on a sofa in the Red Room. Princess Alice knelt down beside her, putting her arms round her. Princess Helena stood behind the sofa ‘sobbing violently’. The Prince of Wales was at the foot of the sofa, ‘deeply affected’, so Major Howard Elphinstone, Prince Arthur’s governor, thought, ‘but quiet’.

‘Indeed, Mama, I will be all I can to you,’ he had said to her.

‘I am sure, my dear boy, you will,’ she had replied and kissed him time and again.

But she could not forgive him. She told the Crown Princess a fortnight later:

I never can or shall look at him without a shudder, as you may imagine. [He] does not know that I know all — Beloved Papa told him that I could not be told all the disgusting details … Tell him [the Crown Prince, who had made an appeal to the Queen on his brother-in-law’s behalf] that I try to employ him, but I am not hopeful. I believe firmly in all Papa foresaw. I am very fond of Lord Granville [Lord President of the Council] and Lord Clarendon [the former Foreign Secretary], but I should not like them to be his Moral Guides; for dearest Papa said to me that neither of them would understand what we felt about Bertie’s ‘fall’. Lord Russell [Clarendon’s successor as Foreign Secretary], Sir G[eorge] Lewis [Secretary of War], Mr Gladstone [Chancellor of the Exchequer], the Duke of Argyll and Sir G[eorge] Grey [Home Secretary] might. Hardly any of the others.